


Touch

by pearbear



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Adorable, Cute, Fluff, M/M, Sweet, big boss and venom getting along, puppies rainbows and kittens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-08-15 00:11:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8034430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearbear/pseuds/pearbear
Summary: Venom finds himself unable to hate Big Boss. Post TPP-ish.





	Touch

**Author's Note:**

> This is super short and unfinished, but I figured I'd post it anyway. I intended to include a lot more (including r18) but I ran out of steam quickly, so the tin can label of BBVenom is actually kind of a lie. As it is, the writing's mostly just of Venom pining for Big Boss. I also seriously struggle with thinking of titles and summaries.

Their meetings were clandestine. The two sides of a coin should only meet by serrated edges. Any time both of them were in a room together was a liability. Big Boss preferred to correspond through a veil, his voice projected through a cassette player or the phone, always concise. Venom would burn any records afterwards. The only tape he kept was the one recorded over a cover of that David Bowie song, the one that first drove a wedge through his cracks and made his head spin so much that he was left doubled over the bathroom sink.

It was the best and worst moment of his life. 

The night before they were supposed to meet for the first time since Cyprus, Venom hated him. His resentment tore through the medulla of his being, made him feel alive with a fury he could not recall ever having. 

He couldn’t sleep, but stared into the ceiling. The fan whirred soundlessly above. He treacherously fantasized about putting his hands over Big Boss's mouth and seeing his dagger sluiced with thick, tar-like blood from the other's throat. He would tear him apart using the same methods that had been artificially beamed into his brain. Their meeting wouldn’t be the dawn of a new heaven, but the end of a nightmare. He could reclaim some sliver of his lost individuality by erasing the original. Simulacrum superseding reality.

However, every time he imagined Big Boss’ face, it was hazy. He didn’t know what Ishmael looked like now under the bandages. He could not conjure an untouched face. It was much easier to imagine it with a horn or dotted with scars, the same face as the one he could barely look at every time he went to the bathroom. 

He went to sleep.

The next day, Big Boss looked at him once and then proceeded to have his back turned to him the entire time, his head cordoned off by shadow created from the cast of the setting sun. It had been months after the first tape correspondence. 

With one glance, Venom wanted to die for him all over again. Big Boss was untouched. He was achingly familiar and hurt to look at like the sun. 

The locations continued to change. A storage facility. The barracks of a captured guard post. No matter which location it was, Venom was always kept at an arm’s length, his eye left to bore into Big Boss’s backside like in the hospital, even though he knew Big Boss more intimately than anyone. Since he was Big Boss, he also knew why, and accepted their meetings as they were. 

The clearing of supply routes from Galzburg. The siphoning of Diamond Dogs’ resources to multiple midpoint locations, in preparation for something newer, greater, better. PMC activity in the surrounding South Africa and Angola-Zaire regions grinding to a halt, or being picked off through backdoor buyouts, the dummy companies Kaz set up being put to secondary uses. The slow but sure progress of nuclear disarmament. Ocelot. Kaz. They ran through these topics over and over, often through a haze of cigar smoke. 

“...Area’s mountainous,” said Big Boss. He put the cigar to his lips, his glance sidelong. The moment he exhaled, the abandoned stone dwelling they’d been in was suddenly hailed on by bullets, some tearing straight through the wooden door and embedding themselves in a nearby table. They dove by the single open window, flanking either side. 

There was shouting outside. Afrikaans. Venom could make out the words “Big Boss” in the flurry, but he had turned off the radio before their meeting for secrecy, his means of instantaneous translation severed. 

“I fucked up,” he said. “They must have followed me.”

“Hm. That’s what they’re saying,” said Big Boss.

“You speak Afrikaans?”

“It’s wise to pick up the language of the area you’re going to be doing business in.”

The men outside were advancing, clad in riot gear. There were about six or seven, their shields and clear face guards glinting even in the dimming light of the setting sun. The PMCs around the area were getting smarter, but increasingly lacked the resources to back it up. The men were few in number. No tanks, no armored vehicles, no rocket launchers. No gas masks. This was a last ditch effort. Big Boss tossed his cigar onto the floor and stamped it out with his boot. He quickly pulled a balaclava over his head and then unlatched a common issue assault rifle from his hip.

“Kom uit!”

Even to Venom’s ears, the meaning was easy enough to make out. He kept his head pressed to the wall, his ear skimming the wooden pane of the window. The heavy footsteps outside stopped, the dry grass crunching beneath their feet. Venom fumbled around in one of his pouches, his hand clasping around a stray sleep grenade. The metallic taste of the pin was heavy on his tongue. He lobbed the grenade over the window.  
The hostiles hurriedly dispersed amidst shouts of “Granaat!”, but some of them weren’t fast enough. Two were caught in the fumes, falling down to the ground with heavy thumps, their helmets lolling off into the grass. They were terribly uncoordinated and clearly hadn’t trained much with each other. Unsurprising, given that all the soldiers in the area were disappearing mysteriously as fast as local PMCs could hire them. 

The remaining few in the squad had escaped into the sides, beyond the view of the small window. 

“How many did you get? Can you see from this angle?” asked Big Boss.

“Two down,” said Venom.

Big Boss moved to crouch directly under the window, his back to Venom’s side. In a split second, he snaked out, shooting the helmet off of one of their assailants. The recoil sent the man staggering backwards, his weapon firing wildly as a last cry. Venom planted a tranquilizer round squarely between his eyes.

Another one down. 

“Hey,” said Venom.

“What?”

“Want to see something cool?”

Big Boss shrugged. Venom rolled up the sleeve to his prosthetic arm, then fired it. Within a few seconds, it connected with a man’s jaw with a crunch. Within another few seconds, it collided with someone else’s nose.

“It’s remote controlled?”

“Yeah.”

Big Boss furrowed his brow. “Pretty brilliant.” 

Venom squirreled Big Boss’s praise away deep into his heart, like a wasp caught in amber, even though he knew from the start the other man would agree. Big Boss’s back was warm against his arm and slightly damp from the heat.

It felt natural like this, like they were two halves of the same whole. Meant to meet and work together, instead of one kept in darkness and the other in light. 

“There’s one left,” said Big Boss. 

“2 o’clock. To your right.” 

Big Boss fired. It missed, grazing the last man’s shoulder. The rocket arm floated back to Venom casually, its knuckles coated in blood. He adjusted it back into his socket. Big Boss fired again, this time unleashing twenty rounds, the recoil sending him straight into the crook of Venom’s body. He felt Big Boss’s latissimus dorsi undulate beneath his chest, like the coiling and uncoiling of a cobra. 

For one brief, agonizing moment, Big Boss’s backside ground into his crotch. Then he stood up.

“You’ll want to fulton them.”

“Right.”

“Our meeting can end here,” said Big Boss. “Till next time.” 

The bullet hole-ridden door creaked as they opened it. Venom went to the fallen bodies, doggedly opening his fulton kits, fishing out the deflated balloons, which felt like lambskin in his hand. The single dead man who had been dealt with last lay far off to the side, his body cloaked by shrubs. Venom turned on his radio again to signal the incoming extractions. Back to routine. 

Big Boss disappeared into the tall grass. His balaclava was still firmly in place, his bobbing head a dimming beacon in the low light of the dusk.


End file.
